


And It Goes On Clear

by oyhumbug



Category: Sons of Anarchy
Genre: 2x01, Angst, Death, Drama, Episode Related, F/M, First Time, Flashbacks, Guilt, Introspection, Lies, Love, Murder, One Shot, Pre-Series, Revenge, Romance, Song fic, Teenage Jax and Tara, relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:33:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25408468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oyhumbug/pseuds/oyhumbug
Summary: When Jax returns home to Tara and Abel with blood on his hands, he is consumed with and distracted by guilt... but not about the murder he facilitated. Rather, his thoughts are in the past, on the first time he ever intentionally drew blood, and how he is still, to that day, haunted by his original sin.
Relationships: Tara Knowles/Jax Teller
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14





	And It Goes On Clear

**And It Goes On Clear  
** **A Jax and Tara One Shot**

With his back arched and his head bent, Jax stood leaning over in the shower, arms braced against the wall, watching as the pink first pooled around his feet and then swirled down the drain. For Jax, pink, not black, was the color of remorse. At least, it had been that way since he was sixteen. Since Tara.   
  
It didn’t seem right, to wash the blood - the shame, the guilt, the doubt, the sin - away with water. Water is untainted, and it goes on clear. Clean. For some people, this was fine. He couldn’t imagine anything but the pureness of water running in rivulets down Abel’s tiny, chubby body. But, for Jax, the water should have been as red to start as the blood it was washing away, the two becoming indistinguishable once merged but never completely rinsed off.  
  
And it wouldn’t all disappear either. While Jax might step out of the shower, clean to the eye but stained and soiled to the touch, the proof of his transgressions would consolidate and condense into a ring of pink around the shower’s drain - more a promise of the future he had to offer Tara than any wedding band could ever be.   
  
Jax always intended to get to the ring first, to scrub it away before Tara saw it. But he never did. He’d forget. Whether it was exhaustion or the monotony of his life and just how often that ring appeared, he wasn’t sure. By the time he remembered it again, the ring would be gone, and Jax often found himself wondering what Tara thought about that ring as her _surgeon hands_ cleaned it, what she believed its origins to be. Did she realize it was because he came home to her and his son with the blood of others on his hands, or did she think it was somehow because of her, a combination of blood from the lives she saved and that of her own body?  
  
The water was scalding, stinging his skin and making steam rise to obscure what little space the small bathroom provided. But, still, Jax didn’t move. He didn’t stand up straight and lift his head. He didn’t reach for the bottle of shampoo or his bar of soap. And he didn’t even register the fact that, while lost in his regret, it wasn’t the man he had killed that day - no, the man he had murdered - that weighed on his conscience but, instead, the first time he had intentionally drawn blood.  
  
Jax smirked, but it was an ugly gesture filled with self-loathing, not humor or warmth.   
  
His original sin.

I like the line between your belly and your thighs  
The smell of your hair  
The sparkle in your eyes  
The smoke in your breath  
The breathing hot and heavy  
The back of your neck  
The shine on your Chevy  
The moon was so big when I drove it to the levee, girl

I found blood and I saw stars  
All in the backseat of your car  
And I told you it was love  
But you won’t know the truth  
I’m a young man in my prime  
With my heart still filled with fear  
And it goes on clear

_“What’s this right here called?”  
  
Breathlessly, Tara teased, “I think this is what the kids call rounding second for third, Jax.”  
  
In retaliation - because she knew that wasn’t what he meant, what he was asking, Jax nipped at one of the creases where her belly and thighs met. Tara’s hips bucked up towards his mouth, and he immediately took the bite back and chased the ghost of it with an open mouth kiss. Tara’s sundress was flipped up, and she still had on her little chaste panties, their innocent, pale blue, cotton softness in stark contrast with the heat that surged through Jax when he looked at them.   
  
He was so distracted by that damn line - he _really _liked it - that Jax almost missed the fact that Tara was talking once again. “I… I don’t know. What it’s called.”  
  
Now _that _captured Jax’s attention. Pushing forwards and up from where he had been reclining between Tara’s awkwardly spread legs, Jax pressed his body more fully into hers and, in turn, pressed her body more fully into the car door against which she leaned. As he burrowed his face into her neck and more importantly the long, thick locks of hair he found there, Jax whispered, “now, why don’t I believe that? Tara Knowles, failing to name a part of the body. Of the human anatomy,” Jax amended, knowing that nothing could get this girl, his girl, more revved up than science. She was such a nerd, and he_ liked _that about her. Wonders never ceased.  
  
He also liked how her hair smelled. “Well, I don’t think it has a specific name,” Tara stated. Despite the fact that she was quickly heading into what Jax thought of as her ‘biology lecture mode,’ Tara was still very much in the moment, and the speed of her words - sometimes so fast he could barely understand her, and sometimes so slow that Jax wondered if she would forget what she was even trying to say before she finished - and the subconscious, exploratory wanderings of her hands told him as much.   
  
“It’s not an actual part,” she reasoned. “It’s not bone or muscle. It doesn’t _do _anything. It’s just… there.” Unlike every other girl that Jax had been with… and_ been with _, Tara’s hair didn’t smell like Aquanet and stale bed sheets. Instead, it smelled clean. Fresh. If Opie knew this was one of Jax’s favorite things about being with Tara, he’d never live it down, so thank the fuck that his best friend could not read minds.  
  
“It turns me on.” And to prove his point, Jax twisted slightly to press his already thick, already straining cock into Tara’s left thigh. It was the leg that was stretched across the old car’s bucket seats, her right spread towards the front and dangling down to the immaculate floorboards.   
  
“To be noteworthy, it would need to _not _arouse you, Teller.” He just grunted. Whether in acknowledgment or argument, he wasn’t sure. Returning to the topic at hand - after all, when posed with a question, Tara could never let it go unanswered, she said, “I guess, if it had to be called anything, it’d be the inguinal ligament, but that’s obviously underneath the skin, and I don’t think it technically creates the crease that you’re talking about.”  
  
He looked at her then, liking the sparkle in her green eyes, the sparkle that told him that, despite her serious words, she was amused and happy. He made her happy. “The inguinal ligament, huh? Sounds kinky.”  
  
“Jax!,” she barked out. And, this time, she actually laughed out loud.   
  
But he stole her laughter with a kiss, stole her breath, and he savored the way it tasted. Tara didn’t smoke, but he did, and Jax could taste himself on her mouth, proof that, if anything, they shared possession of her body. That reminder drove the kiss forward, deepened it, made it feel like it went on forever and, at the same time, seemingly no time at all. Before Jax knew it, Tara was wrenching her lips away from his, turning her head towards the window as she sought to get fresh air into her lungs once again. He liked when he made her lose control like that, when everything was so hot and heavy between them that they could forget that they were still parked in her old man’s driveway, the car not even turned on yet.   
  
At some point, Jax had clenched one of his hands in the endless fall of Tara’s hair, lifting it off of her shoulders as he tried to control the tenor of their embrace. When she desperately ripped their mouths apart, Jax somehow still managed to hold onto her hair, leaving Tara’s soft, delicate, vulnerable neck exposed and presented to him. He rubbed his cheek against it, the cheek that was just starting to boast the grit of real facial hair and not the peach fuzz of adolescence. God, Jax even liked the back of Tara’s neck.  
  
Once she had regained control, Tara murmured, “let’s get out of here, okay?”  
  
Instead of verbally answering her, Jax sat up and twisted around so that he was once more actually in the driver’s seat. It took a few moments and more than one try to get situated, the old car, despite its size, anything but accommodating. Even after he turned the key in the ignition, they remained there, idling. While his right hand hunted for her left, his eyes searched for her, too. It was then that Jax noticed how bright the night was that evening, how the black paint job on the Cutlass didn’t absorb the light but made it shine. It helped him decide where he was going to take her.  
  
So that he wouldn’t have to let go of her, it was Tara who reached over with her far hand to put the car into drive. Although they hadn’t been… although she hadn’t been his for long, nor actually even completely - yet, they just fit. So much could go unsaid between them but still be understood. As Jax turned them out of Tara’s driveway and onto the road, pointing them in the eventual direction of the levee just outside of town, he almost forgot to turn on the headlights, the moon was so big that night.   
  
It was so big and so bright that, an hour later, Jax didn’t need a light to find the blood, Tara’s blood, on the black leather of the Cutlass’ backseat. While he had cummed so spectacularly that he had seen stars - literal pinpoints of colors bursting just beneath his eyelids, phosphenes, Tara had cried, her silent tears clear but unable to wash away the stain that would forever mar Jax. _

_And it wasn’t the sex that marked him or the act of taking Tara’s virginity but the fact that, in that moment, Jax lied to her. He told her that he loved her, because that’s what he thought she wanted, what he believed she deserved. Tara was a good girl, yet she was with him anyway; she let him be the first to fuck her when she wasn’t even his only fuck that month. Yes, technically, those other girls were from before he and Tara had started to fool around, but Jax knew he wasn’t in love with her, but he gave her those words anyway._

The clean dreams, the sexy limousine  
Jason’s got the energy  
He used to be a coke fiend  
The skinny brown arms coming out of your shirt  
Heart is in the right place, brain is in the dirt  
You live life like everyone’s an enemy

Or maybe he had already been in love with her then. Jax wasn’t sure now. He couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment when affection and lust turned into love. But what he did know was that, when he first said those words to Tara, he hadn’t meant them, and, even if he had been unaware of his feelings at the time - and, let’s face it, that wouldn’t be unthought of for a teenage boy driven by his urges and awash in oxytocin and endorphins, it wasn’t real. It wasn’t deep, and all-consuming, and dangerous, and desperate like it was now, like it had only become in retrospect _after_ Tara left him.   
  
And that’s why Jax considered Tara’s blood from that night his original sin, because, if he hadn’t said those words to her, drowning in fear that would make him do or say anything to hold onto her but, at the same time, a fear that would constantly threaten and eventually succeed in pushing her away, then Tara might not have stayed with him for as long as she had, and he was pretty damn sure that she never would have come back to him.   
  
There was nothing inherently bad about them together. In fact, before Abel, Tara was the best part of Jax. But the inverse was not true, and, when he thought about the start of their relationship back during high school and before Tara went off to college, Jax could only recall and see the disparities - clear versus pink, a pink wanting to be red, deserving to be red - and the lows to which he had brought her - the wholesome hopes Tara had nurtured as a teenager versus Jax’s own base, erotic wants and desires.   
  
While Tara dreamed of good grades and a full-ride scholarship, he saw a limousine on the night of what should have been their senior prom (by then, Jax had long since dropped out of school), its long, sleek, ostentatious lines making Jax fantasize about getting between another pair of long, sleek lines - Tara’s legs - and fucking her so thoroughly that, when they arrived at the dance, she wouldn’t even be able to stand.   
  
As a dropout, though, Jax hadn’t been welcome at prom, so Tara couldn’t go either - not _his_ girl. Even if he hadn’t quit school, Jax didn’t want to think about how Gemma would have bitched and Clay and the other guys would have taunted him for being so pussy-whipped that he spent his hard-earned prospect money on such a cliche, high school rite of passage. However, imagining the echoes of their derision hadn’t lessened the longing ache in his cock, so Jax, on that long ago night with Tara pressed up behind him and the limo to their right as they waited for the light to change, had filed the urge away in his mind, thinking maybe he’d rent them a limo when he convinced Tara to forget about college and marry him instead. Soon afterwards, though, she was gone.  
  
He thought about all of the horrible people he had introduced her to when they were younger - Tara so innocent and the drunks and addicts; the misogynists, and the bigots, and the racists; the crooks, the criminals; the liars and the cheats; there had even been some rapists and a few murderers, too - anything but. These men, club members and hangers-on alike, had made Tara uncomfortable. They were wild and unpredictable, sometimes even manic, watching her with a predatory purpose and poise. Jax had always promised himself that he’d never let anything bad happen to her, that their regard was flattering, not dangerous. 

In the end, through no vigilance or intercession on Jax’s part, nothing had ever come of the unwanted attention towards Tara. And then she left him and Charming. But that wasn’t the point. The point was: had being with him and around the lowlifes of society that comprised the club and their associates made Tara forever susceptible to that kind of threat against her? Was their earlier relationship and the formative years they spent together responsible for the abuse Tara had suffered since?

When he considered Tara from back then, back when they were still kids, really - a little skinnier and a lot less jaded, he recalled how, before becoming a doctor, Tara didn’t wear sunscreen, her face and arms always tanned from days spent in t-shirts and jeans on the back of his bike; how, even with all of her intentions to be and do good in this world, with him, because of him, sometimes for him, her thoughts and actions somehow always ended up mired in mud and muck; how, because of that initial lie that sealed their bond and their relationship, that premature ‘I love you’ that hadn’t actually materialized yet, Jax made damn sure that he would become the most important person, the only person, in Tara’s life, everyone else - her father, her teachers, his mom, his club, any and every other woman he encountered - the enemy she needed to fight for and defend him against. 

And now he was doing it again. Perhaps Jax was secure in the sincerity of his words now - he loved and was in love with Tara Knowles, completely, but his motivations for telling and showing her how he felt weren’t any more pure than they had been when they were kids. He needed her, and she needed the words to stay. He knew that.   
  
So, he told her how he felt, and he tried to ignore the fact that the blood on the back of her Cutlass’ black leather seats had now been replaced by the blood of a man he’d murdered. Maybe Jax hadn’t pulled the trigger on the killshot, but he was responsible for that Mayan’s death anyway, his lie to protect Tig and the club forcing Opie to fire. Jax could say what he wanted about doing what he had done for his best friend’s peace of mind, for revenge and retribution for Donna’s death, but the gestures were empty and without honor.   
  
It didn’t matter what he tried to wash his transgressions away with, for the stains would never fade or disappear. Pure, real, honest love was like water. If it couldn’t cleanse him, then nothing could, his original sin forever and exponentially magnified. Jax recognized this, but he wouldn’t change any of it.  
  
Because he wouldn’t, couldn’t, let her go.   
  
So, when Tara asked him for the truth, he told her. He told her about the murder, the retaliation. But he also kept the ugliest aspects of his life - uglier even than death - to himself. Because, while he knew she could still love him for avenging a friend - her friend, too, she’d never forgive the dishonesty behind it. For Tara, the lie of omission to her wouldn’t be nearly as damning as the blatant deceit and disrespect he had shown his best friend, his brother - a cowardly act that would, Jax feared, ultimately prove to be another original sin.   
  
But Tara was beside him, her hand in his, her body holding him tight - a shield against all of his past, present, and future wrongdoings, and, really, that’s all that mattered to him; it justified… everything. With that silent admission and inevitable acceptance, Jax fell asleep.

I found blood and I saw stars  
All in the backseat of your car  
And I told you it was love  
But you won’t know the truth  
I’m a young man in my prime  
With my heart still filled with fear  
And it goes on clear

**Author's Note:**

> Inspiration for this story and the lyrics featured within come from "Indie Rokkers," originally by MGMT but recently covered by Soccer Mommy. This one shot is meant as a separate, contained piece, though it would fit some of my other one shots, especially in mood and tone. While I know that the crease referred to in the flashbacks is now called a thighbrow, that term is a recent one (circa 2015) and popularized by social media. It did not exist during the mid-90s when Jax and Tara would have been together as teenagers. Finally, I do not know what this means for my future posting. Am I back to focusing on Jax/Tara, or was this just a burst of inspiration, in part an attempt to exercise my obsession with Soccer Mommy's cover? (I'm still listening to it on repeat... for whatever that's worth.) Who knows. I sure as hell don't. For now, I hope you enjoy this one shot. 
> 
> Thanks,  
> Charlynn


End file.
